CuriousBread > CuriousBread's Quotes

“A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind.”
― Sengstan, Hsin Hsin Ming

“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”
― George Addair

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Be patient. Your future will soon come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.”
― A.E. Housman, Last Poems

“Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”
― Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Jung

“She wants to tell them that Blue Gamma was more right than it knew: experience isn’t merely the best teacher; it’s the only teacher. If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.”
― Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

“It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.”
― Ted Chiang, The Great Silence

“Every decision you make contributes to your character and shapes the kind of person you are.”
― Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

“Low expectations are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we aim high, we’ll get better results.”
― Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

“People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn. But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film. ·”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.”
― Ted Chiang, The Best of Subterranean

“We like the idea that there's always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there's someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone's control.”
― Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”
― William Butler Yeats

“If video games have taught me anything, it's that if you encounter enemies then you're going the right way”
― Ali G.

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
― Joseph Campbell